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The places that landscape paintings depict can be real, completely imaginary or a combination of actual and imagined elements.
At the beginning of landscapes in art, the landscapes themselves were simply used as backgrounds to religious paintings or portraits and were not considered terribly important, hence there are religious paintings celebrating the story of Christ that are set in European surroundings complete with churches! These early religious paintings generally did not show actual places but were made up of realistic elements often seen in rural views.
As landscape painting grew in popularity, artists would make studies of places but then create the finished work of art in the studio, made up of many studies. In this way, many artists created generic places that did not really exist but looked very familiar as they were made up of key parts, including natural features and, often, classical ruins.
Interpretation and artistic licence allowed artists to play around with what they could see. Artists could present an idealised view without the imperfections of nature or they could change what could be seen with the eye in order to create a more pleasing composition and interesting painting. Rubens painted realistic vignettes (views) from nature but then combined many in one painting, cleverly controlling the composition; in this way he created a realistic, natural view but with more aspects, happenings and points of interest than one would really expect to find in one place.
Other artists were very faithful to nature and as landscape painting grew in popularity, more methods were discovered for creating 2D images of 3D scenes. An invention called a Camera Obscura permitted artists to recreate views with more accuracy.
The camera obscura (Latin for dark room) was a dark box or room with a hole in one end. If the hole was small enough, an inverted image of what was outside the box or room would be seen on the opposite wall. Artists could set up Camera Obscuras where the inverted image was projected onto canvas so they could capture the details, colours and perspective very accurately by tracing over the projected image. An Arabian scholar called Hassan ibn Hassan (also known as Ibn al Haitam) described a camera obscura in his writings in the 10th century. In the 15th century Leonardo da Vinci described its use for artists and many artists are believed to have used a camera obscura from time to time, including Canaletto, Vermeer and Reynolds.
Artists in the 19th century started to paint directly from nature, taking their work from the studios to the fields, which meant that they were able to recreate entire vistas. In order to capture the light and weather, artists had to work quickly and the Impressionists quickly recorded impressions of views that are recognisable, albeit blurry.
Before photography, paintings and drawings were the only visual ways of recording how things looked. Paintings of specific places were commissioned by landowners, created for tourists as souvenirs and they were also painted in order to show newly visited exotic places.
These depictions of places are not necessarily completely accurate as artists still tried to create pleasing compositions, but they do convey a general feeling of what that place is like – with common features found there, light and weather depicted to show a general feeling of that place, not necessarily an exact replica of that place. It is possible to tell, with a bit of information about a place, where a painting is trying to be: it is easy to tell from a glance that Cuyp’s painting is of the Netherlands; the palm trees and dry, dusty appearance of Marilhat’s painting immediately tells us that it is not a painting of a European place. The classical ruins on this idealised image do not really tell us anything as they are not true but they remind us of Rome and Italy.